Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Alessia Trivellone
Collection d'études médiévales de Nice, vol. 10. . Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. 493 pp.; 36 color ills.; 166 b/w ills. Paper €50.00 (9782503528380)
To begin with, I confess that I have some difficulties accommodating myself to wide art-historical surveys such as Alessia Trivellone’s L’Hérétique imaginé, which covers a span of six centuries with the aim of tracing a coherent development of a sole subject, the heretic. I am not stating that my skepticism will diminish if the survey is chronologically narrower or comprehending more subjects; the point is, rather, that I find serious problems with every sort of “coherent development.” The division of the volume into four sections corresponds more or less with what Trivellone maintains to be a coherent… Full Review
January 13, 2011
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Patrizia Cavazzini
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 256 pp.; 24 color ills.; 47 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780271032153)
Richard Spear and Philip Sohm, eds.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 30 color ills.; 120 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (9780300154566)
These two books, which describe how painters made a living in seventeenth-century Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Naples, synthesize the work of many dedicated scholars, including some by the authors themselves. As Patrizia Cavazzini notes in her introduction, most research on Italian painting has favored major painters and their patrons, neglecting the large supporting cast who also made a living as painters and decorators in Rome and elsewhere. Some worked assisting painters charged with covering extensive wall surfaces with religious or mythological scenes, providing illusionistic architectural frameworks [quadratura], or adding generic landscape vistas or patches of al antica… Full Review
January 13, 2011
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Patricia G. Berman
New York: Vendome Press, 2007. 272 pp.; 288 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780865651814)
Patricia G. Berman’s In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century is a beautiful book about an area of nineteenth-century art that is little known outside of Denmark. Although Robert Rosenblum and Kirk Varnedoe laid the groundwork for understanding the work in a larger European context, the scholarship and publications in English have been modest. Berman rectifies this situation with her well-illustrated and comprehensive book. In Another Light offers an overview of a range of discourses in Danish art, which Berman analyzes as she locates the works in their broader socio-cultural context. When applicable, Berman brings in examples of… Full Review
January 11, 2011
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Peter Murray, ed.
Exh. cat. Cork and Dublin: Crawford Art Gallery in association with Gandon Editions, 2008. 256 pp.; 233 color ills.; 36 b/w ills. Cloth $82.50 (9780948037665)
Exhibition schedule: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland, October 24, 2008–February 14, 2009
The art of Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) engaged the most crucial historical, religious, political, and literary issues about national identity in Britain with a rigor and breadth scarcely rivaled in the history of nineteenth-century British art. His work covered diverse historical subjects, including intimate easel paintings devoted to courtly love and large governmental murals celebrating chivalry and the Battle of Waterloo. The attempt by contemporary art historians to revise the canon of nineteenth-century art has encouraged scholars to study Maclise, but such serious attention to his work is new. Until recently, the lack of scholarly engagement with Maclise has partially resulted… Full Review
January 11, 2011
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Mary Hollingsworth and Carol M. Richardson, eds.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 480 pp.; 16 color ills.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (9780271034683)
As declared on the dust jacket for The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700, “Cardinals occupied a unique place in the world of early modern Europe, their distinctive red hats the visible signs not only of impressive careers at the highest rank the pope could bestow, but also of their high social status and political influence on an international scale.” Often dismissed as a blip by both contemporaries and subsequent historians, the study of ecclesiastics has received limited scholarly attention (excepted for a few good essays and volumes), despite its interested appeal. This book, edited by… Full Review
January 7, 2011
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Ken Tadashi Oshima
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. 320 pp.; 20 color ills.; 200 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (9780295989440)
In looking at modernist buildings, few would be surprised to see ceramic tiles or neocrete coating punctuating the pristine white surface of a rectilinear, multi-level, reinforced concrete building. Projects realized during the interwar period in Japan, however, might also feature wooden pilotis, tatami mats, and thatched roofs. Far from assuming “a style-less style,” as the architect Horiguchi Sutemi claimed of his own creations, the residential, civic, commercial, and recreational structures designed by Horiguchi and his forward-looking peers aimed to create an international architecture, kokusai kenchiku, that expressed the new and modern with distinctive regional inflections. International Architecture in… Full Review
January 7, 2011
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Boris Groys
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 187 pp. Cloth $24.95 (9780262072922)
Boris Groys’s Art Power brings together fourteen essays published between 1997 and 2007, and one previously unpublished essay, no date. It ranges over intellectual positions promulgated since the Enlightenment, so the text will be familiar to readers of long-standing disputes about concepts of the modern, the new, the different, the autonomous, the identical, the heterogeneous, et al. All of the essays are written in a philosophical tone, some with astute juxtapositions of art and politics. There are good chapters on Hitler and art and Stalinist dictates in the Soviet Union. Given space limitations, I can only focus on some of… Full Review
January 7, 2011
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Erina Duganne
Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010. 248 pp.; 38 b/w ills. Paper $35.00 (9781584658023)
Erina Duganne’s The Self in Black and White offers five overlapping case studies of photographic projects created in and around New York City during the postwar period. In four chapters and an epilogue the book explores the photographic practices of the African American Kamoinge Workshop; Bruce Davidson’s “American Negro” project and the Office of Economic Opportunity’s “Profiles of Poverty” exhibition; Davidson and Roy DeCarava’s civil rights photography; DeCarava’s photographs of Harlem; and Dawoud Bey’s “Harlem USA” project. The chapters work together to explore the relational nature of selfhood as expressed through photographic practice. Duganne’s book is an ambitious and… Full Review
January 6, 2011
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Katharine A. Lochnan and Carol Jacobi, eds.
Exh. cat. Toronto and New Haven: Art Gallery of Ontario in association with Yale University Press, 2009. 224 pp.; 100 color ills.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300148329)
Exhibition schedule: Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, October 11, 2008–January 11, 2009; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, February 14–May 10, 2009; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, June 14–September 6, 2009
William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) lived long enough to see his role as founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood embraced and dissected. Like John Everett Millais, he was later charged with abandoning his early revolutionary artistic goals and pandering to mainstream taste. Hunt’s popularity represented less of a movement away from early idealism than a gradual refinement and elaboration of it, and the public came to love the work that resulted. A catalogue accompanying an exhibition with the same title, Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision offers new insights into how this process unfolded in ten essays, which discuss Hunt’s work from… Full Review
January 6, 2011
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Anne Dunlop
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 340 pp.; 161 color ills.; 41 b/w ills. Cloth $80.00 (9780271034089)
Anne Dunlop’s fascinating volume on domestic wall painting in Italy in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries contributes to the study of early Renaissance art in several overlapping ways. Most immediately, it introduces the reader to a group of little-known decorative complexes in private residences throughout the Italian peninsula, although concentrated in its northern areas. Dunlop gathers surviving cycles of wall paintings that are neither religious nor civic, using the term “secular” as a kind of synonym for domestic. None of these works has yet entered the standard canon used to understand the period. In assembling and examining this corpus… Full Review
January 6, 2011
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